Social curation has been used for many years by bloggers, news sources and influencers around the world to bring together content. It's being used across sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter to allow following users to discover new content every day.
Creation to curation
Content creators have always been focused on delivering new content to their communities every week to keep a consistent flow, but as we see a growing number of content creators in the UK & US, we saw a decrease in content creation and an increase in content curation on sites like Twitter, Facebook & Pinterest.
Content curation does offer a stronger position for the everyday social media user, allowing them to share the best content they can find versus having to create and deliver new content, which can take extended periods of time for companies and creators.
Examples of curation
Companies are becoming advocates of content curation above content creation after seeing higher conversion levels from consumers.
Go Pro is a fantastic example of a company using social curation to their advantage. Go Pro's marketing efforts and content are primarily channelled into their customers. Their clientele uses the product daily, and create and share new videos while they use the products. The marketing team at Go Pro take advantage of this content and socially curate this online to help broadcast their message.
In a Nielson report, 92% of all consumers trust earned media over owned media, showcasing the efforts companies will need to go to make sure their influencer marketing is one of their stronger sources of promotion. For Go Pro, this earned media is valuable, and their social curation allows them to drive their marketing efforts on social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Tweet source.
This not only allows companies like Go Pro to acquire new community members but also content creators to develop more pieces of content for their social curation efforts.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing has become more consistent in larger companies like Adidas, Samsung and LG. These influencers raising awareness for the products on social media has opened up a route for businesses to then become curators.
A good example of influencer marketing has been Oh Polly's clothing brand, working with young females on Instagram to share customer photos of their clothing. This form of influencer marketing also offers curation of their female influencers and apparel. With their 190,000 followers on Instagram, they've developed a stronger relationship with new customers by working with top influencers on Instagram and curating their content.
Oh Polly Instagram page.
Social media channels have become the hub of social curation. There have been designated curation services such as Pinterest, Storify and Pearltrees, and these are growing in popularity. For example, Pinterest, used by 100 million users every month (as of September 2015) allows users to bring together their favourite "pins" - allowing for constant curation with smaller clippings of media, creating content to upload to Pinterest directly.
The growing trend for curation is on the photo-sharing service, Instagram. Instagram has been getting bigger by the day with 500M monthly active users, according to Facebook's Q2 2016 report. There are many benefits to using Instagram for curation, especially with it's visual appeal and youth.
Social curation tools
There is a substantial focus for small and big business to be aware of curation as a marketing tactic to grow user conversion on social media and websites. There are tools that businesses can use to prepare for curation as a conversion tool.
Yotpo, a social curation platform best known for allowing businesses to get closer to customers using social content, recently launched a new Instagram service. This new feature allows businesses to pull together Instagram accounts and connect with best mentions of a business's product, using Instagram's array of imagery it'll allow businesses to create media to fit alongside your product or service, driving higher customer conversions.
A statistic from Yotpo's research suggests consumers prefer "authentic customer photos" versus "professional photos" generated by the company, the percentage who prefer customer photos is 77%.
Services like Yotpo and Livefyre are examples of the growing trend for influence lead purchases. These services can add huge value by giving a business a platform that can be not only a curation tool but a CSM system, rights management, shoppable feed creator and easy moderation of content.
Tools like LiveFrye from Adobe feature these social communication tools, allowing you to modify people's experience of social imagery - taking curation to a more personal level.
Curation will continue to be a growing trend in the world of content creation as we see more content creators switch to this form of managing content and individual taking up this role.
Keeping on top of the latest posts about your product or the most recent feature within your service is important, and understanding the persuading others to use something through other sources can be an efficient method of acquiring new users on the scale.